Within hours of its launch on March 5 last year, the Kony 2012 online video was on its way to becoming what was then the most-watched viral video of all time.

The controversial 29-minute video was designed to make Africa's most wanted war criminal, Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) - a Ugandan rebel group - so infamous that he would be captured and tried for crimes against humanity.

Within days, US president Barack Obama was being badgered by his own children into taking action, and within a month, 100 elite US Special Forces commandos were sent to track him down.

In June 2006, and without any sort of commission in place, British freelance journalist Sam Farmar set off to interview Kony and challenge him on the massacres and mutilations that made him Africa's most wanted man.

To this day, it remains the only interview the reclusive Ugandan warlord has ever given. It was shown around the world, including on the ABC's Foreign Correspondent program.

Sam Farmar has taken the time to write an account of how the meeting came about.

An interview with Joseph Kony

I first heard of Joseph Kony and the LRA in 1995. I was working in a sprawling refugee camp in northern Ugandan for a few months before heading to university.

One night Kony's forces stormed the camp attacking and looting the already impoverished refugees and leaving many dead. I wasn't caught up in the immediate attack myself but as morning broke I soon became all too aware of the sweeping fear that engulfed the terrified crowds.

Tales of atrocities proliferated: massacres of whole villages, ears, lips and limbs chopped off, children abducted and forced to kill - and even eat - their victims.

The LRA combines the fanaticism of a cult with ruthless military efficiency, and while its apparent aim is to impose the Ten Commandments on Uganda, its means could scarcely be more evil.

It was on hearing these tragic stories that I made it my mission to track down Kony and confront the man behind the attacks, putting out feelers wherever I could.

It seemed an impossible task but with the help of Mareike Schomerus, an indefatigable researcher and academic, we set about making contact with everyone and anyone who had ever had any association with Kony - family members, former negotiators, politicians, LRA escapees, aid workers, military advisers.

After a year of tirelessly knocking on door after door and racking up thousands of pounds in satellite phone calls, all on our own personal budgets, we finally got word that Kony would meet us. I raced home, high-fived my flat-mates, sunk a curry, booked a flight and packed my camera.

'I had no choice'

Within 24 hours, I was in Nairobi airport. I was met by Dennis and Ray, undercover LRA commanders who certainly did not look like bush fighters - Dennis wore a boy-band denim cap, Ray a tight Ben Sherman shirt.

As we flew on to Juba, now the capital of South Sudan, Ray explained why he had joined the LRA.

"I had no choice," he said.

"They just came and abducted me at 14. Many times I tried to escape but it was not easy - they can punish you badly. If you are unlucky you may lose your life."

They just came and abducted me at 14. Many times I tried to escape but it was not easy - they can punish you badly. If you are unlucky you may lose your life.

Undercover LRA commander Ray

Tears welled in his eyes.

Ray introduced me to Sunday, a comrade who said he had been abducted at the age of 7 but now regarded the LRA as family.

We waited for a week as the LRA men checked me out. They were so suspicious that they had originally proposed buying us new cameras lest ours were fitted with devices that would betray Kony's location.

I wasn't actually scared, with so much over-the-phone planning before this point I felt pretty confident that Kony wanted to meet us as much as we wanted to meet him.

In his mind, he no doubt hoped that we could be manipulated and charmed enough to give the LRA some positive PR at a time when they weren't as strong as they would have liked to have been.

I was also confident that we had put all that we could in place to mitigate the risks. For our own security, we had told very few people what we were doing - if our location had got out then Kony himself may have felt compromised and could potentially act irrationally.

Besides, it is said "worry doesn't empty tomorrow of sorry but empties today of strength" and we needed every last ounce of strength we could get.

Finally Riek Machar, a former Sudanese warlord with a degree from Bradford University, arrived announcing he would come with us to meet Kony.

The next day, accompanied by 40 Sudanese soldiers, we boarded a charter flight to Maridi, the closest Sudanese airstrip to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mystical powers

We arrived and piled into a convoy heading straight into the jungle on a rutted track of deep red mud. Two days later my satellite phone showed that we had crossed the border into Congo.

After a short while we stopped and two LRA fighters armed with Kalashnikovs jumped in. Their eyes were blank and bloodshot, their hair in dreadlocks, and strings of bullets hung around their necks.

We looked at each other and said nothing. Outside, another fighter called Knee of a Dog talked on a satellite phone, juggling our meeting place until the very last moment.

We eventually reached a clearing where we found ourselves surrounded by camouflaged LRA combatants carrying M16 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

They never let down their guard, and they clearly lived in constant fear of Kony, to whom they attributed mystical powers.

Sunday said that if he tried to escape, Kony's spirit would seek him out to harm him. When I asked whether the LRA would disintegrate if Kony died, he struggled to comprehend the question.

"Kony would never die," he said.

"I'm sure he cannot be killed."

We waited there until Knee of a Dog received another call. We walked single file along a narrow path hemmed in by impenetrable vegetation. I began to wonder if I would recognise a man of whom there are so few pictures.

'I am not a terrorist'

For more than 25 years, Kony had thwarted every effort to capture him, but now he was in front of me, in green Ugandan army uniform, and surrounded by a ragtag group of heavily armed guards who regard him with manifest awe.

He wore a blue beret, a red sash over his shoulder, and green Wellington boots.

He was taller that I expected - around 1.8 metres - and looked younger than his 46 years. He grinned at me, exposing two chipped and blackened front teeth, then shook my hand:

I have eyes, a brain and wear clothes, but they are saying: 'We don't talk with people, we eat people. We are killer'. That is not true. Why do you meet me if I am a killer?

Joseph Kony, speaking in 2006

"I'm a freedom fighter who is fighting for freedom in Uganda," he told me.

"I am not a terrorist."

We only spoke briefly that night. Before long he left, I set up my small green tent and exhausted fell asleep.

Early the next morning I was taken to another, smaller clearing where Kony had spent the night on a mattress of cut grass.

He was wearing a T-shirt, sitting on a brown plastic chair, drinking tea from a pink plastic cup and eating a mandazi, a sort of doughnut. He greeted me in English: "Come on, Sam. Eat breakfast!"

But the cheeriness vanished when we tried to attach a microphone. He had never seen one before and feared that it was a tracking device.

It was a rambling conversation, with Kony speaking in poor English, but for someone giving his first interview he seemed remarkably natural.

"I am a human being like you," he declared.

"I have eyes, a brain and wear clothes, but they are saying: 'We don't talk with people, we eat people. We are killer'. That is not true. Why do you meet me if I am a killer?"

Guided by spirits

He insisted that he was not the monster his reputation suggests, that the atrocities of which he is accused are trumped up to blacken his name.

Asked about the killings, abductions and mutilations perpetrated in his name, he replied: "That is not true. It's just propaganda by Museveni, the Ugandan president, he went into the villages and cut off the ears of the people, telling the people that it was the work of the LRA.

"I cannot cut the ear of my brother, I cannot kill the eye of my brother."

He said youths joined the LRA voluntarily and were never abducted.

"I don't have acres of maize, of onion, of cabbages. I don't have food. If I abducted children like that, here in the bush, what do they eat?"

[Spirits] speak to me. They load through me. They will tell us what is going to happen.

Joseph Kony, speaking in 2006

Asked about the International Criminal Court charges against him, he insisted he was not guilty.

He said he was guided by spirits.

"They speak to me. They load through me. They will tell us what is going to happen. They say, 'You, Mr Joseph, tell your people that the enemy is planning to come and attack'," he said.

"They will come like dreaming, they will tell us everything. You know, we are guerrilla. We are rebel. We don't have medicine. But with the help of spirit they will tell to us, 'you Mr Joseph go and take this thing and that thing'."

Perhaps the spirits are still protecting Kony because, despite the unprecedented attention and rumours that he is dead, Kony is very much still alive.

Only last month I was in east Africa and although I didn't speak to Kony personally, I am in touch with many of his closest commanders and his arms dealer and he is continuing to ruthlessly kill and abduct children.

Kony 2012 may have been controversial and a surprising viral sensation, but the core message is good and remains true to this day. Stop Kony.